A Berkeley Orthodox Jew hurrying to Shabbat services last Friday claims a man he believes to be a Muslim punched him several times in an alleged hate attack.
Jason “Yakov” Ashworth, 26, claims the man had been jeering him throughout a BART ride from San Francisco and followed him onto the U.C. Berkeley campus.
“I was walking incredibly fast. It was the Shabbos trot,” recalled Ashworth, a kosher overseer who works for the Vaad Hakashrus of Northern California and attends Chabad services. “I noticed this man was following me. And he did speed up when I sped up. After five minutes of walking we were right in the center of campus and he walked right beside me and said, ‘Are you an Israeli citizen?’
“I said, ‘Yes, and, if I might ask, where are you from?’ As soon as that happened, I didn’t get my answer. I just got popped in my eye.”
Ashworth, a native of Queens, lived for several years in Israel and moved to the Bay Area a month and a half ago. He said the attacker punched him in the head and body several times before he was able to cover his face and deflect several of the blows.
After a flurry of punches, the attacker — whom Ashworth describes as a black man in his early-to-mid 20s, standing roughly 5-foot-11, weighing between 150 and 170 pounds and wearing dark clothes, gloves and a wool hat — casually walked off.
When Ashworth shouted for passers-by to call the police, he said the attacker returned and menacingly told them not to. Ashworth was eventually directed to a pay phone, where he says a man who witnessed the attack was already phoning the University of California Police Department. He spoke with a UCPD officer last Friday, filing an official report on Monday.
“A hate crime is definitely an important crime for us to investigate and follow up on. We certainly treat it a lot differently than a dispute between two people where there are a couple of punches thrown,” said Capt. Bill Cooper, the UCPD’s public information officer. “It’s obviously a battery, and the hate crime statute could enhance the penalties and make it a much more serious crime.”
As of Tuesday, Cooper said he did not believe the UCPD had tracked down any eyewitnesses to the crime, including the man who originally reported it. The attack took place a stone’s throw from the Cesar Chavez Student Center, and dozens of students in large-windowed study rooms may have been witnesses. Cooper said, however, that the high usage and turnover of those study rooms makes it difficult to locate individuals who may have seen the attack.
Ashworth said his attacker was one of five or six young black Muslim men he saw on a BART train after he got off work in San Francisco. Ashworth claims the men — several of whom wore knit skullcaps and spoke to each other in Arabic — were identifiably Muslim.
“When I got on the train, the first thing I heard was that Jews and Arabs are both Semitic people, except for European Jews, who are not Semitic. I’m perplexed, I’m thinking, ‘What did that mean?’ Then one of them said something about Jews controlling the media,” recalled Ashworth. “They were being loud and obnoxious and said it for the whole train to hear, and especially me, I guess.”
Ashworth stepped off the train at Oakland’s 12th Street to transfer to a Richmond train, and the crowd of men disembarked as well. All but one of the group departed for other platforms, but the man Ashworth claims later attacked him also boarded the Richmond train.
Ashworth said he was getting a “bad vibe” from the man and changed cars. But while hurrying through the U.C. Berkeley campus for services at Berkeley’s Chabad House, Ashworth noticed he hadn’t eluded him.
“The only reason I talked to him is, I know from experience, when people travel in groups, sometimes there’s one person who’s not so far out,” said Ashworth. “Maybe he was going to apologize on their behalf or say, ‘I’m not part of that’ or something.”
Rabbi Yehuda Ferris, spiritual leader of Chabad of the East Bay, said Ashworth did make it to last Friday’s services — with a shiner.
“I think people are desperate. The economy…we just had a bicycle stolen from the synagogue porch. But this sounds pretty anti-Jewish,” said the rabbi.
Speaking of Ashworth’s assailant — or any religiously motivated attacker — Ferris added, “Obviously these were misguided people who thought they were doing a good thing or evil people who need to be punished.”